On 28 March, unknown persons attacked and burned the car of journalist Adela Gómez, from Radio 21, in Santa Cruz province (southern part of Argentina). The attack took place while her car was parked outside Gómez’s house. The journalist is well know in the area for her investigations on local polical power. “I don’t know if I’m going to keep practicing the profession because I fear for my life, and I have a family,” she said.
The Maltese Front Against Censorship has asked the country’s MEPs to raise the country’s case in the European Parliament. The Front is concerned with recent infringements on freedom of expression, which include punishment of carnival revellers for dressing up as Christ, the ban of the play Stitching, the threat of a prison sentence to a newspaper editor for publishing an erotic story, and the suspended prison sentence to an artist for offending against the Catholic religion. In February, protesters gathered in the capital Valetta, against escalating censorship by government agencies.
Yesterday Chinese users of the Google.cn search engine faced problems accessing results for normal terms such as “dog” or “home”. Although Google has redirected traffic to its uncensored servers in Hong Kong, internet users in mainland China still face the Great Firewall, which bans access to sites containing sensitive information. The glitch was caused by Google’s new coding which incorporated “gs_rfai” into certain search terms. The letters “RFA” was mistaken to be an acronym for Radio Free Asia, a site banned by the Great Firewall.
The American games company Envoy has dropped its libel suit against the English blogger Bruce Everiss. Envoy was suing Everiss for libel in an Australian court over a series of blogposts on Everiss’ website, bruceongames.com, in which he had claimed that Envoy had previously been owned by a Chinese company, UMGE, linked to a Chinese “gold-farming” business. Everis alleged UMGE employed low-paid workers to earn virtual money in online games, and then sold it, against the game’s rules, to other players. Envoy dropped the case, halfway through its second day, telling reporters that the decision was driven by criticism from its customers.